Meta

Is "how to do bioinformatics" the major topic in bioinformaticians online reading habits?

Sifting through my website stats, I realised that bioinformaticians are reading more posts discussing “how to do bioinformatics” than the ones with a strict scientific content. Is this a feature of this blog, or does it reflect a common problem with working habits?

Drawing some conclusions after two years of atcgeek

After almost a couple of years blogging on atcgeek, I can dare to say a thing or two about this experience. If I scroll the statistics of this blog, I cannot really complain about the interest generated in the readers. Even though I won’t become famous by writing here, I can tell that 38k views from January 2014, and peaks around 1k views/day is not a bad result, considering the long pause I had to take whilst moving to Barcelona and starting my PhD. Nothing really special, but not even a disastrous failure.

The three main topics at atcgeek

Although I use to divide my posts into thematic categories (bioinformatics, biochemistry, structural biology, etc.) and into types of article (news, insights, video, hacks and personal blog), I realised that I basically tend to write on three topics: education and work practices, methods and reflections. The posts of the first kind are about “how to work in bioinformatics” or “where to learn the basics”. The second ones are the one in which I report the new methods that have recently published, and the third category recoils the posts that propose scientific insights on the role and the nature of computational and theoretical biology.

The most of the interest goes to educational and work habits posts.

The order in which I mentioned these three topics, coincides with their ranking in terms of interest generated. Education and work practices come first, methods are the second ones, and the bronze medal goes to the insights. Swiftly and boldly comparing my site statistics with the interest generated on social network, I can dare to say that the people who read atcgeek are particularly interested in discussing about how to improve their working habits, how to start working in bioinformatics, or to share a bit of self-irony with me as I talk about the shit I use to do when I work. Take it as an impression that is barely supported by statistics, but plausible enough to put a question.

Based on what I see on atcgeek, people is more into discussing how to do bioinformatics or how to learn the basics, rather than the bioinformatics itself, and there could be some reasons behind this.

Of course, we should keep clear that this blog is written by a PhD student who is sharing his experience while walking the first steps in computational biology. This is a point, since anyone would be more interested in the opinions of someone more influential than me for anything about the “scientific part”. The main goal of this blog is to horizontally share my experience and to productively interact with my visitors, more than claiming to be an expert of the field and aiming at “coaching” the readers. On the other hand, anyways, if experience matters, it should matter in both the topics, since the thoughts of an experienced scientist are more evaluable than mine in both work habits and in science.

Do we have a problem with how to do our work?

Despite the shift I am seeing in the readers’ interest may be due to the characteristics of this blog, I still have the feeling that “how to work” is the major “hot topic” in bioinformatics community, and we may strongly suspect that this reflects a problem. Bioinformatics is basically the domain of non-computer scientists working with computers, the merge of two super-rapidly changing sciences, and the development of proven, shared and consolidated work strategies is far to be a reality, especially if compared with experimental biology, were lab practises are widely discussed and protocols are consolidated.

There is one last thing to say. In the real ranking of the most visited post, the most read one is not really about bioinformatics. Let’s say that this discussion should be focused on what bioinformaticians use to read online when they are keen to read about science. Including the other interests could be puzzling.